Stolen by Starlight (Warrior Kings of Alioth #1)

by Sara Ivy Hill

I’ll never see Lothan’s face again. Funny how, when you think you’ve lost everything, you can still lose more.

I swear to Alioth, diplomacy will kill me if a dagger doesn’t.

Alioth’s teeth only test my worthiness of her gift. I’ll do whatever she requires as proof. Slaughter a hundred enemies, defy the Eye, break a peace treaty. Disown my brothers. Spend every coin in my treasure house. Give up my crown. Anything.

We are trapped. They will execute us when we land at the next spaceport, I expect—if they don’t starve us first. We will die together, so there is that comfort.”

I tasted the universe without him, and it was bitter and cold. I’m deeply fucking grateful to spend my last hours or days with him, even if we spend them locked in a cell.

My promise is empty, like all my promises to her. To know her. To find her sister. To prove to her that she is my fated queen. I have failed on every count.

His body—perfect, sculpted, marred by a slash of blackened bandage—stays flushed a pale purple, the color he says means mates. His true color. Love. Love for me, if he’s to be believed.

My sister is in the hands of evil slavers, a dozen women’s fate hangs on this negotiation, and I’m making out with an alien. It’s sick. I’m sick. But I can’t help it. I love him.

“You are mine. If you put lightyears between us, it will still be true.”

A rare sight, a discomfited Xaszian. Perhaps their queen-worship is their weakness, if it disturbs them so much to see a female unhappy.

I am not immune to queen-worship myself.

The goddess demands a sacrifice from all of us, and this is mine. I will be known as the emperor who ruined Irra. A villain in history, perhaps, like my father Chanísh, whose rule was filled with war and discontent. Who caused Alioth to withdraw her favor.

Lightning bolts of bright pastel colors flicker over his face and down his body—pale blue, rosy pink—more and more until they illuminate every shadow, driving away the clouds and then twining and melding together until his skin is a swirling, pale lavender that pulses in time with the beat of his heart. His true color. Not the color of the sandy rocks of Irra, but the color of us.

I feel the goddess in my bones. My home, my purpose, settles into me, becomes part of me like the crown became part of my skin.

To love is to risk. To be dangerously, beautifully vulnerable. Alioth knew it, and this is why she brought me my Alara, to teach me how to embrace the shadow of her favor—the promise of loss that haunts love like a ghost.